State-mandated educational regulations require approximately 1,500 hours of curriculum be taught in the 1,200 (or fewer) instructional hours contained in the typical school year. This discrepancy makes it difficult for teachers to find the time to plan and teach. In addition, teachers need to balance testing requirements with real world preparation. With all these demands, teachers excel when they inject their own vision of teaching into the classroom.
Every state in the United States (with the exception of Iowa) has developed a set of standards that are the basis for state testing of students. State websites offer the standards. However, these are generally not in a searchable database and do not provide teachers with what they need most: an easy way to access state standards, to view them in the context of the curriculum that they can teach to students and to have the ability to add their own instructional materials to the standards. Teachers also need a way to evaluate the importance of each standard based on the occurrence on state tests and on to relevant life-long skills required of most students.
Existing internet-based systems allow the user to do one or more of the following:                1) Display a lesson and then, through a series of selections, see generically formatted state standards that relate to that lesson OR        2) Query a search engine for a lesson or activity, which is based on specific grade level and subject only and not associated with any state standards OR        3) Submit lessons and activities to a database that is not correlated to state standards or if they are it is, as an adjunct to the process, rather than the key element of the submission OR        4) View subject specific lessons OR        5) View selected standards that have aligned “for fee” resources        
Accordingly there is a need in the art to provide educators with achievement tools (lessons, assessments and resources) correlated to educational standards, in a convenient, easy to use form with multiple “achievement tools” easily added from diverse sources.